-Caveat Lector- http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=25676
WJPBR Email News List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War! Where is al-Qaida's next stop? Focus shifts on core of bin Laden's logistical operation ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Editor's note: DEBKAfile's electronic news publication is a news-cum-analysis live wire, online round the clock seven days a week. A weekly edition,DEBKA-Net-Weekly, is now available through WorldNetDaily.com. Drawing on DEBKAfile's unique sources, analytical talents and forward-looking insights, it is presented as a compact, intelligence-angled weekly package. It is available as a direct e-mail feed or via the Internet. © 2001 WorldNetDaily.com Mohammed Mullah Omar and Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri have become household names since America launched its post-Sept. 11 war in Afghanistan. So have places like Mazar-e-Sharif, Konduz and Tora Bora, as well as the Pashtun tribes. But just when the United States is seeing its way to victory over the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan, new names, places, tribes and groups come into sight. For unlike the Taliban, al-Qaida's international spread is broad enough to provide it with hideouts and rear bases in many places outside Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden could hardly be expected to wait around for the Americans to catch up with him in the Tora Bora cave complex or the snowbound mountains of Afghanistan. The question of where the al-Qaida leadership is laid up will loom large over the final stages of the anti-terror campaign in Afghanistan. After all, routing the network and bringing its leaders to justice are the premier goal of the U.S. campaign there. At the moment, the Taliban is far from being a write-off – and al-Qaida forces, even less. They have withdrawn to the mountains or assumed new garb and hidden their weapons, losing themselves in the populations of the cities, including "liberated" Kabul, until they judge it time to resort to arms again. Many have slipped over into Pakistan. For al-Qaida, Afghanistan was never more than one of several key bases of operation. Although bin Laden kept family members and some training camps there, terror experts are becoming convinced he had the organization's logistical, operational and financial core tucked away somewhere else. In fact, intelligence sources place his organizational backbone in Africa, in view of its many advantages for the furtherance of terror. One-fifth of the Earth's land mass, the African continent is 46 times the area of Afghanistan, its combined population of 600 million is 26 times larger and divided into 1,000 different peoples. Many of its 50 or so nations are sunk in lawless decay. There, bin Laden, who treated Afghanistani Airlines as his private carrier, has dozens of carriers to choose from and hundreds of remote air bases in the vast wastes of Africa – like the secret one he retained in the Rigestan desert, some 150 miles south of Kandahar, where U.S. Marines have set up their Rhino base. The United States, which has clearly come to the same conclusion, has in the last couple of weeks taken its first, exploratory anti-al-Qaida steps in Africa, and may be on the brink of expanding the base of its war on terror to this continent. U.S. logistical and intelligence support for Ethiopian army units are collaborating with Somali warlord Col. Abdullah Yousef Ahmed. Specifically, joint local forces have been in action chasing Taliban and al-Qaida elements out of the north Somali town of Boosaaso. Military sources say about 200 Islamic extremists were killed during the capture of the city by the Somali version of Afghanistan's "Northern Alliance." The Somali transitional government of President Abdulkassim Salata Hassan has often denied the presence of Islamic terrorists or training camps in Somalia, but his domain covers only the capital, Mogadishu, while the rest of the country is fought over by rival warlords. On Tuesday, Dec. 11, ABC News and the Washington Post reported a U.S. military delegation in Baidoa, 150 miles west of the capital, Mogadishu, to find out from Somali tribal chiefs and warlords more about bin Laden's training camps and bases in the area. They also probed the local chieftains' willingness to seize those bases and al-Qaida operatives. According to ABC, the U.S. team, made up largely of CIA and Special Forces officers, offered the local Somali chieftains substantial bribes for their cooperation. Sources add that the heads of the Ethiopia-backed Somali opposition Rahanwein Resistance Army, in return for hundreds of thousands of dollars each, agreed to contribute some 6,000 of their men for military action against al-Qaida bases in southwestern and southern Somalia, under U.S. Special Forces command. They also talked to the heads of the rival Somali Reconciliation and Restoration Council, which is also supported by Ethiopia. Its chief, Hussein Aideed, urged the United States to move against Somalia's al-Itihad al-Islamiya, which is affiliated with al-Qaida. He says the group receives generous funding from Islamic extremist organizations and Arab states, enabling them to buy Somali followers. The RRA chiefs took the U.S. delegation on a tour of inspection of Baidoa and its airport, to see if it was suitable as a back-up landing site for large-scale U.S. contingents, should a military operation become necessary. U.S. contingency arrangements with local chieftains may not be consummated in the near future, but they are in place – just in case. Bin Laden has no substantial presence on their turf as yet, unless large numbers of Taliban and al-Qaida troops in flight from Afghanistan and Pakistan decide to head for Somalia. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Walter Kansteiner said in Nairobi yesterday that the first goal is to make the Somali environment inhospitable to terrorists and terrorist cells. The deal with the Somali warlords is intended to do just that, to keep large numbers of fleeing Islamic militants from seeking haven in the country and, if necessary, back up operations to keep them out. The RRA leadership, due to its cooperation with Ethiopia, is locally unpopular, which makes some of its intelligence on al-Qaida's Somali bases suspect. But neither was the Northern Alliance in northern Afghanistan in October when first recruited by the United States to fight the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, that joint front has been largely successful. In southern Somali, near the Kenyan border, the United States is seeking a similar local contingency arrangement. However, the inhabitants of this region, in Gedo, Jubbada, Hoose and Jubbada Dhexe, are extremely hostile to strangers. Failing local war allies, the Americans will have to rely on its own forces should it become necessary to prevent extremists sympathetic to al-Qaida from being recruited. At the least, the United States hopes to draw on local forces to keep the Kenyan frontier sealed to interlopers. Military sources report a massive shift of American military strength westward. The bulk of this strength is on its way out of the strategic locale of the Afghanistan operation, including the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf, to areas within reach of the Horn of Africa, Iraq, Yemen and the eastern Mediterranean, namely Lebanon and its Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley. The aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk, a floating command center for air and marine forces in Afghanistan, is heading out of the Arabian Sea. The Kuwait command is being built up for two functions – one, that filled by the Kitty Hawk in Afghanistan, and the other, to receive the rear high command transferred from Atlanta, Ga. The greater part of the 70,000-strong U.S. Third Army will be deployed in Kuwait and other points in the Middle East. Military sources add that elements of the U.S. Third Army's elite 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions are on the move to U.S. bases in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. Most will be stationed in the giant Sharm el-Sheikh air base at the southern tip of Sinai, which commands the northern Red Sea, western Saudi Arabia and southern Jordan. Those divisions have called up reserves, placing them on notice to report after New Year's Day for duty in Sharm el-Sheikh, but the advance guard of command elements is in place. Also on their way to Kuwait and Sharm-el-Sheikh are several hundred M-1A2 Abrams and M-2A2 Bradleys tanks, as well as mobile artillery. In the last two or three weeks, senior U.S. officers, mainly Air Force and Navy, have been making liaison rounds of Egyptian, Turkish, Jordanian and Israeli general staff operations departments. Terror experts stress that even if the entire Horn of Africa is cleansed of al-Qaida, terrorists in Africa remains to be tackled. At most, the terrorists retain a fringe presence there, unlike in 1991, when Somalia became an important link in the chain of bases bin Laden built in Sudan, Ethiopia and eastern Africa – mainly in Kenya and the Comoro Islands in the Indian Ocean. Then, the terrorist's cohorts operated out of Somalia's main cities, Mogadishu and Baidoa, as well as in the south, along the Kenyan border. In October 1993, U.S. Rangers and the Delta Force felt the sharp edge of those networks when they were forced into the biggest firefight the U.S. military had waged since the Vietnam War, in the Mogadishu marketplace. It ended in retreat and the deaths of 18 American servicemen. At the time, bin Laden and al-Qaida were at the pinnacle of their strength in this region. After the terror attacks against U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, the command backbone of al-Qaida's regional cells was driven out of Kenya and the Comoros, then out of Somalia and on to Yemen, where their tracks petered out. In winter 1999, bin Laden visited northern Somalia for his last known visit outside Afghanistan. He explored the possibility of setting up their satellite stations and a communications system to link his scattered forces via Ethiopian communications firms that he owned, and maybe still does. Already then, he suspected that his Somali networks were exposed to U.S. intelligence eavesdropping and the Horn of Africa was becoming dangerous for his operations. After a brief trip to the Somali Indian Ocean coastal town of Ras Kaambooni, bin Laden ordered his forces there substantially thinned out. According to intelligence sources, two senior aides were with bin Laden on his trip to Ras Kaambooni: Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, several months earlier the operations officer of the East African U.S. embassies bombing operations, and Mohammed Fazul, who participated in the embassy attack in Nairobi. Both are to be found on America's most-wanted list of 22 terrorists. And both, plus a third key al-Qaida operative, are worth an especially hard look in Washington before the war on terror is extended to the African continent proper: Ahmed Ghailani's role is analogous to that filled by the late al-Qaida chief of staff and chief military tactician, Mohammed Ataf, who lost his life in the U.S.-led offensive in Afghanistan, and Mohammed Fazul, who in Africa would fill Ayman al-Zawahiri's role of deputy leader. The third operative is Imad Mughniyeh, top of Washington's wanted terrorist list before bin Laden's advent for his anti-U.S. atrocities in Lebanon of the 1980s. Just before the Sept. 11 attacks in America, bin Laden named him supreme commander of al-Qaida networks in the Persian Gulf, the Middle East and Africa. This trio has been assigned joint command of bin Laden's networks in Africa. *COPYRIGHT NOTICE** In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for nonprofit research and educational purposes only.[Ref. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ] Want to be on our lists? Write at [EMAIL PROTECTED] for a menu of our lists! Write to same address to be off lists! <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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